Guillermo Klein Y Los Guachos
This is the story of how Guillermo Klein came to write an arrangement for me, some random music journalist he didn’t even know. But much more importantly, it’s about how Klein pulls off one of the more impossible things in composition: writing tricky, complicated music that sounds natural.
See, Klein is a tinkerer. Think of your friend who’s an interior decorator, and every time you visit her place, all the furniture has been rearranged. Or your cousin the bicycle racer, who is always jury-rigging some exotic new contraption to shave weight off his ride. Sometimes, Klein is like that, but with music.
He’s known as a composer, especially for his U.S.-based “little big band” Los Guachos. But his last album, Domador de Huellas, rearranged folk songs by an Argentine composer for an Argentine band. Many of those songs felt stretched apart and uniquely reassembled. When I interviewed him about the album via e-mail, Klein wrote, “The way all this happened was through playing the pieces as they are, and then demanding [of] them emotion and rebirth through my playing, it was inevitable that all these devices would show up at some point.”
One of the “devices” he often plays with is meter. You know how different types of songs have different organizing “feels,” right? A waltz goes “ONE-two-three, ONE-two-three”; a polka goes “one-TWO, one-TWO” to correspond with “oom-PAH, oom-PAH.” There’s much more to it than that, but that’s the way we feel meter.
Klein will take a song that has a three-beat meter, like a waltz. (Several Argentine folk styles are “in three.”) But he might superimpose nine beats over those three. Or maybe two upon three, or four upon three. So you might count “ONE-two-THREE-four” in the same time you would usually count “ONE-two-three”—that’s four over three. He calls these sort of metric devices filters. Filtros, in Spanish.
Okay, time for some arithmetic. Klein’s signature filtro will really blow your mind: It subdivides six into 7-7-7-3. Check out just one iteration from “Fugue X,” a favorite of Los Guachos:
Did you catch it? Here it is, in fuller context:
First, talk about tinkering: These harmonies are based on a Bach fugue!
Now, if you’re new to this stuff, you probably didn’t hear the 7-7-7-3 breakdown. That’s where the math comes in. If you have six beats to play with (two measures of 3/4 to be exact), you could subdivide those six beats by four each. So you’d have 1-2-3-4-5-6 divided as 1234-2234-3234-4234-5234-6234. That gives you 6 x 4 = 24 beats to play with. And lo and behold, 7 + 7 + 7 + 3 = 24. If you count really fast, you can confirm.
You can hear those six beats in different ways too. In fact, when I first heard this song, the only way I could make sense out of it was to think of it as 4-3-4-1. If you subdivide the six beats by two, you get 6 x 2 = 12 = 4 + 3 + 4 + 1. That may be valid, but the way Klein thinks of it at its most basic level is 7-7-7-3. One more example, on “Amor Profundo,” featuring Los Guachos with Catalan singer Carme Canela:
And in fuller context:
So now that we’ve addressed how he can make this staggering, asymmetric beat work, the question remains: Why does it work?
I can’t explain why human ears have evolved to like this stuff, but I’ll posit several contributing factors. One is that Klein works with top-notch players; many of Los Guachos are your favorite jazz musician’s favorite musicians. Another is that Los Guachos have grown supremely tight in over a decade of playing together. Yet another is that Klein likes pretty tone colors, like fat bomba drums, or gorgeous female voices, or six horns blasting you in the face.
I also surmise that this metric tinkering gets at the heart of something very important to all Afro-Western music. If you stack two (or more) meters over each other, you’ll usually be juxtaposing different beats too. That’s polyrhythm, and it’s innate to why Latin jazz is so exciting—all that percussive layering! Clearly, Klein’s polyrhythms are idiosyncratic, but they’re also modifying familiar folk patterns. So we can still nod our heads to the result.
Which brings us back to…me. Klein’s signature 7-7-7-3 never appears on Domador de Huellas. So when I asked him about it, during the previously-quoted interview, he wrote, “Praise the Lord I didn’t use it on [this material].” Surely, what he was doing was plenty complicated already.
When I went to see his band play the Domador de Huellas repertoire in concert—live at the hallowed Village Vanguard in New York, no less—he pulled out a tune that wasn’t on the record. “La Arenosa” is a common-knowledge song in Argentina, and he flipped it with the 7-7-7-3 filtro. When I introduced myself to him after the show, his eyes opened wide. “Oh, you’re the journalist who asked me about the clave loco!,” he said. “You know, I wrote that arrangement for you because you asked me why [I] didn’t use it on this album …”
I hear that Guillermo Klein is bringing a new bag of tunes for this visit to the States. Once again, he’ll play them at the Village Vanguard. But tonight at Reynolds Industries Theater, North Carolina will get to hear ‘em first.
Patrick Jarenwattananon (photo: Becky Lettenberger)
Patrick Jarenwattananon is the editor of NPR Music’s A Blog Supreme.
